We finished our last resupply on the 15th of this month and Vasiliy Golovnin (voyage 4 - in the photo) departed the day after taking with her five expeditioners from Davis. During the five days of resupply I opened the post office again (being the official Australia Post postmaster for 2006) and processed a couple of mailbags worth of outgoing mail (we had 19 mailbags coming in!). Resupply time is always frantically busy with all hands on the deck and with the trades people working long shifts to get all cargo moved in the minimum time possible. There is no such a thing as fixed duties down here - everyone pitches in wherever they can and for example the rostered kitchen hand duties were mainly taken over by the scientists who cannot help with things like moving containers with huge forklifts or operating massive cranes. Being at an Antarctic station is certainly not like being at a holiday resort - this ain't Hotel Davis! It seems to me that a lot of people think that being down here is just one big camping holiday - that is a serious misconception.

Today we have a visit from the Chinese ship, Xue Long, which is taking their expeditioners back home. Xue Long is the sistership of Vasiliy Golovnin and somehow it is nice to have a ship sitting in the bay - maybe a subconscious reassurance that not all ties with the outside world are cut off just yet?

We now have only a few days to go before the rest of the summerers leave on Aurora Australis voayge 3, which will be arriving next week. All site maintenance work is slowly being wrapped up and the efforts concentrate on getting everything ready for the winter when there will be only skeleton staff to keep things up and running. We still have the pleasure of having the elephant seals down at the beach - someone counted over 60 of them the other day!

The weather has been pretty average for the past weeks and we even got some snow (which melted away the day after). I haven't been able to take too many any photometer measurements since 4 February and by the looks of it I may not get many more before the months ends. The lidar has been operating on the few clear nights with the team concentrating their efforts on building and configuring the second receiver channel, which is now ready for testing. Hopefully this winter we can run a configuration with one channel for PSCs (high temporal/spatial resolution for the lower stratosphere) and another for standard temperatures.


Amongst the resupply business and other duties such as a couple of slushies (= being the rostered kitchen hand) I have made some further progress with the code migration and now I just need to finish testing all the IDL routines. I have started working on the DMI microphysics model integration which involves HYSPLIT trajectory output files being fed into the DMI model and then plotting the results alongside with the actual PSC analysis from Davis (at this stage comprising a 3D backscatter contour plot, a vertical backscatter profile and sonde and AURA temperature profiles).

I also received some VLF (Very Low Frequency) receiver parts on V4 which I will use to build a little experiment to hopefully catch some solar flare signatures in the ionosphere. I have never done anything like it but this is as good time as any to start - this is the first step and maybe in a few months I can make an attempt to build a "proper" heterodyne receiver - I wish we had a dish down here! The plan is to try and get involved in some radio astronomy with the 26 meter Mt Pleasant dish in Hobart (http://www.phys.utas.edu.au/physics/physics_mt_pleasant.html) when I get back to Australia. Our resident electronics engineer here is a RF (radio frequency) electronics guru and I have pestered him into promising to teach me some basics during the winter. He calls it "The Black Art" which sounds exceedingly nonlinear and certainly more interesting than the idiot-proof first year RL circuit frequency response analysis (not to mention the oscilloscope here - the one we used at the Uni pretty much had two knobs and five buttons whereas this monster has more buttons, gauges and knobs I can think a function for). I had brought a small space shuttle model to build it as a hobby while down here but I'm finding that I'd much rather spend my time in the lab with the soldering iron!